People Really Believe Time Is Money, And That's Making Everyone Unhappier

Companies may think that setting goals and offering performance
bonuses to employees will help motivate them, but those
strategies add to a trend that's making workers increasingly
unhappy.

A
recent paper from Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford
and Sanford DeVoe of the University of Toronto argues that
these practices promote an "economic view of time" — the
idea that time is scarce and should be thought of in monetary
terms.

That makes us less able to enjoy time off because we always think
of it as losing money.

The modern employment relationship generally increases the
connection between time and money with important implications for
people’s choices about how to use their time, including how much
to work and how much to volunteer their time in unpaid
activities. Although it may not have been consciously
done, modern management seems to have created a hedonic treadmill
in which people want to trade time for money and because of
thinking of time like money cannot enjoy leisure activities as
much.

Society reinforces this:

...the social status of leisure versus work has changed
over time so that working is now a status symbol, signaling
people’s importance to their organizations—a change that
itself may derive in part from how we view time.

Basically, when we think of time as a resource and connect that
to money, we're more likely to constantly feel stress, even when
we're not on a deadline or under pressure.

On an organizational level,
the authors suggest that companies be aware of how deadlines
affect the psychological well-being of their employees, and think
about how the language they use and the things they measure might
be creating a permanent sense of stress.